[erlang-questions] erlexec and its environment

[Bengt Kleberg]

Greetings,

There are some Erlang functions that have {env, [...]} argument. Ex:
erlang:open_port/2.

I think it would be good to have the same syntax ("a list of tuples
{Name, Val}, where Name is the name of an environment variable, and Val
is the value it is to have in the spawned port process." and the same
semantics for exec:run_link/2's {env, [...]}.


bengt

 On Tue, 2013-05-07 at 10:34 +0200, David Welton wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We're doing some work to fix up a few things we perceive as
> deficiencies in erlexec, and thought about asking for a community
> opinion.
> 
> Currently, this:
> 
>     exec:run_link("exec /tmp/print_env.sh", [])
> 
> Launches the child process with no environment, which was quite a
> surprise to us - the default on Unix systems is to have child
> processes inherit the parent process' environment.  We're hacking the
> system so that it'll behave like we expect.
> 
> When an environment is specified, we were thinking to use that to say
> "ok, clear out the environment and don't inherit it":
> 
>      exec:run_link("/tmp/print_env.sh", [{env, ["VIVA=ERLANG"]}])
> 
> So that if you really needed to pass it in, you could do:
> 
>      exec:run_link("/tmp/print_env.sh", [{env, os:getenv() ++ ["VIVA=ERLANG"]}])
> 
> Thoughts?
> --
> David N. Welton
> 
> http://www.welton.it/davidw/
> 
> http://www.dedasys.com/
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